Olin's Essay Prompts 2017-18

As of today, August 1st, the 2017-2018 Common Application is open! This means that if you are planning to apply to Olin College this year, you will now be able to start your application, add Olin as one of your prospective colleges, and check out Olin’s supplemental questions and essay prompts on the Common Application website.

You have plenty of time (5 whole months!) between now and our application deadline on January 1st to complete and submit your application to Olin. But just in case you’d like to start brainstorming and playing with some ideas for those essay questions, we thought we’d share the prompts with you now!

Essay Prompt #1 (250-500 words): Olin is a community striving to improve the world for everyone or anyone through engineering. What change do you hope to see or be a part of? Why is this change important to you?

Essay Prompt #2 (250-500 words): We would like you to choose one of the following prompts:

Tell us a story about a time when you made someone happy. What effect did the experience have on you?

When, where or with whom are you your most authentic self? What makes you feel most like you?

Think about things that excite or engage you (for example, people, ideas, projects, books, causes, innovations). Keeping that in mind, tell us about how you would spend a “perfect day.” What makes that perfect day a day well spent?

In the coming months, we’ll be posting more blogs with application advice, including advice about how to approach writing your essays. In the meantime, if you have any questions about applying to Olin, please don’t hesitate to direct them to our office at apply@olin.edu.